������Ƶ

Picture this nightmare scenario: The year is 2024, and voting has just started in Hawaii’s primary election. Two well-known candidates are running for office and are neck and neck in the polls, as they have been since the beginning of their campaigns.

Who will win is anyone’s guess, but both candidates have their own factions of special interests and big money behind them who are desperate for a win to shift the balance of power in Hawaii.

And then, just as mail-in ballots arrive, a cellphone video recording emerges on social media, showing one of the candidates speaking at a private fundraiser, making alarming promises of what political capture will mean for them and their friends.

In under an hour, the video goes viral and is re-shared, re-posted and highlighted on tens of thousands of social media accounts, and local media decides to do stories about a video that’s circulating online.

The candidate denies ever making the statements, and claims the video is fake. Worse yet, it turns out the video was covertly made by malicious individuals through the use of new, hyper-realistic artificial intelligence tools. 

By the time local media fact-checks and corrects the narrative, public opinion has already changed against that candidate, and enough mail-in ballots have already been cast against them to disrupt the election. And even more worrying, there are many people who still believe the video is real, and continue to share it, claiming that the media is attempting to suppress “the truth” about who that candidate really is. 

Of course, neither the opposing candidate, their surrogates or their community supporters had anything to do with that fake video, but, in the end, the damage was done, and they all benefited from it. 

This is exactly the direction that democracy is headed as both artificial intelligence and technology make leaps and bounds in the span of not even years, but months. The emerging ability to shift mass public opinion with fake or edited content that looks and sounds real over social media is something that can undermine our democracy and cause chaos on a statewide, even national scale.

Unfortunately for us, malicious people with an eye for disruption understand psychology and social media better than most of the “good guys” providing election security or even gatekeeping private media. Legal regulations and even technological countermeasures against deceptive content are no match for an inflamed public, and as is often the case, people arguing for and against the veracity of something online usually serve the goal of promoting lies further rather than actually advancing truth. 

Let me give you a personal example.

A good friend of mine, who lives in one of the Persian Gulf states, sent me a video last week by private message, showing an incident that purportedly occurred during the current Israel/Gaza conflict. The video was emotionally upsetting, to say the least, and it was so awful that my first inclination was to denounce it.

But after watching it carefully, I realized it was completely fake, and I let the matter come to a halt right there. I didn’t reply to my friend. I didn’t repost it with a personal reaction to the content, and I didn’t privately send it to other people, editorializing or voicing disgust about how much I hated that “fake” video. I recognized it was visual plutonium, morally contaminating anyone who might see it, and I employed what  – “to kill by a wise and informed silence” – and just let it go into a memory black hole.

The problem with this type of fake content, if you’ll excuse my language, is that it’s specifically meant to piss you off and get you talking about it, for, or, against. In you doing that, it has the same effect on everyone else who sees it, and does the same. It’s meant to play to your base instincts and hidden biases. In this regard, malicious content spread on social media is a kind of weapon of mass destruction, and it can cause everything from riots, to electoral manipulation, to even national upheaval. 

So how do we as a community prepare against and fight this kind of thing?

Well, the problem of misinformed democracies is a problem that goes back even as far as Plato talking about  where a philosopher has immense difficulty convincing his peers that what they think is real is actually fake. (If you’ve never taken a political science or humanities course, watch TED-Ed’s great, .)

The first thing we need to do is recognize that our social institutions and elections are vulnerable. Conformity, peer pressure, outrage and how malicious social engineering can affect those things need to be at the forefront of our minds. We need to do something we haven’t done before as a community and we need to train ourselves how to process observations (what we see/hear/feel) into correct decisions.

I know they don’t teach this in school, but they should. Being able to have the patience to set aside biases and say “wait, let’s think about this for a moment and let’s consider the source” is going to be crucial to saving the American experiment of democracy in the years to come. 

Second, the for-profit news media, which currently is rewarded for being the first to report on things and then correct the story later, needs to consider their role as it pertains to behavioral and social impact. There are too many evil people who have mastered the art of weaponizing the media, and there are too many people in positions of news prominence who want attention and popularity, no matter the long-term consequences. 

The First Amendment was indeed created to protect what might be considered the most heinous and unpopular forms of expression to protect an oppressed or unpopular minority. But it leaves to us as individuals and communities the more important moral choice of asking ourselves whether we should choose to express something or not. 

This “freedom” is not meant as a freedom to do evil, but rather, a freedom to exercise personal restraint and to engage in enlightened choices towards one’s community, state, and nation. 

Personally, I’m worried about the future of our government and democracy. But I also have hope that if we know what’s at stake, what our weaknesses are, and what threats are out there, we can be more than just reactionary voters and be good citizens.